BSkyB Wins £709m Lawsuit Against HP-EDS 187
E5Rebel writes "In a massive legal case in the UK, HP-EDS has been found guilty of 'fraudulent misrepresentation' by their sales team when winning a major CRM project. Settlement could cost £200M out of an initial claim for £700M. HP's only relief was that parts of the claim were dismissed, but the core claim was upheld. HP is likely to appeal. Outsourcing will never be the same again. HP workers have been on strike against pay cuts last week; no doubt management will try and screw them further to pay for this debacle."
Overstated. (Score:3, Insightful)
TFA: "Nigel Roxburgh, research director at the National Outsourcing Association, previously told Computerworld UK that if the case is upheld in favour of BSkyB, "it could lead to a real scratching of heads, particularly among lawyers."
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it could lead to a real scratching of heads, particularly among lawyers."
At least they've been practicing scratching the other end.
Sorry, I mean practising.
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I settle for "real beheadings, particularly among lawyers."
If EDS has to tell the truth it is dead. (Score:5, Insightful)
Has anybody ever heard of (or better yet been involved with) an EDS project that went well.
Anyone?
EDS is characterized by: lots of promises, no delivery, never saw the experts present during negotiations again, lots of low GPA recent college grads doing 'work' they are not qualified for.
I don't know how EDS stays in business. Kickbacks to purchasing officers with no stake in the projects is my guess.
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Although it's possible things have changed in the past decade, having worked for EDS as a new graduate, I take issue with your assertion. It's full of high GPA recent college grads, with a seriously over-inflated sense of their own competence, doing 'work' they are not qualified for, managed by people whose sole qualification is that they are the sub-set of that group who lacked the ambition to leave their employment in order to do something less pointless long enough to be promoted.
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I always assumed anybody with a decent GPA would have some experience/contacts by graduation and be able to get a better job.
I know I did.
I guess the defining characteristic of EDS employees is 'not knowing what they are doing'. GPA varies.
I have had to interact with EDS staff. I don't believe _they_ ever got a high GPA (except maybe in the school of education.)
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They do a good job of things like hosting and infrastructure (in fact they host most of the airline reservations systems worldwide)
Hopefully you just chose a bad example ;-)
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Actually, the computer thingies in job centres work fairly well. The underlying database that they provide access to is badly designed, and badly filled in, but the terminals themselves largely work (and have EDS logos on them).
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lots of promises, no delivery, never saw the experts present during negotiations again, lots of low GPA recent college grads doing 'work' they are not qualified for.
This hardly differentiates EDS from their competitors. :(
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Granted.
Which should make this a scary decision for any of these scumbags doing business in England.
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I'm kind of torn.
Do I want the scumbags to all go out of business, and stop sucking so much IT budget into their black hole of incompetence, giving the people that can actually do the work the chance to get paid more and deliver things?
Or do I want them to continue fucking it up, as my next career move could well be independent consultancy addressing exactly this type of scenario?
Time to read up on Game Theory..
Re:If EDS has to tell the truth it is dead. (Score:5, Insightful)
Apparently you are not familiar with the Navy NMCI Contract with EDS. I haven't been following it lately (as in the last few years) but it had VERY overpriced systems on the contract and mostly hired people who didn't have much experience because they were cheap. That contract would keep even the worst managed company in gravy for quite a while. I don't know what most of the military guys thought about it but just ask any civilian employee for the Navy what they thought of NMCI and listen to the expletives fly.
I'm not sure how any company can sell computer software or services without lying, even unintentionally. Anything worth bidding on by EDS is going to be complicated enough to keep them from knowing what they really have for a month at least.
The worst part is if you're going to expect technology salesmen to tell the truth then you're going to eliminate at lot of material for the Dilbert comic strip, among others.
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The old saw that seems applicable here: The difference between a software salesman and a used car salesman is that the used car salesman knows he's lying.
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I don't know how EDS stays in business. Kickbacks to purchasing officers with no stake in the projects is my guess.
Government contracts for one thing. Hardly anyone (or no one) else of notable size bids for them most of the time as they simply don't want to deal with the red tape and other hassle (taking part in a procurement process can be very expensive in terms of time and effort, especially for large projects, especially for governments), so EDS get some fairly lucrative contracts due to being the only real contender in the procurement process.
I've worked alongside EDS (they managed the IT and other infrastructure f
Observer bias (Score:2)
Has anybody ever heard of [..] an EDS project that went well.
No, and that's not surprising in their field. As a company that provides infrastructure, EDS projects are expected to go well. It's not notable when they succeed.
There's just not a lot of articles in the news about "Multi-billion dollar project went as expected". It's not that they never do, rather it's not newsworthy when they do.
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In Finland there is company called Tieto (formerly TietoEnator). The sole reason why it stays in business is size. It is almost the only big player in the field.
No small company can compete with their claims.
TietoEnator has horrible track record. Just to point two (of many):
1. Parliament voting system. Took several years as the first(?) system was overloaded by the votes - maximum of 200. Yes two hundred votes (given within few seconds) overloaded the system, the tests showed pretty much random output. BTW,
Re:Overstated. (Score:5, Informative)
IAAL. I work with technology contracts. I think that the only reason a lawyer will be scratching his head is because of the genuine unlikelihood that the customer could actually prove a fraud case against a vendor. That's not to say it's impossible, just so unlikely. What's clear is that this was not a contract case. If it was merely a contract case, it would have looked to the four corners of the agreement. The plaintiffs (the customer) had to work extra hard (i.e., $40M in legal fees hard) to prove the fraud.
Customer-clients regularly come to me with contracts that have:
1. no objective criteria to measure success/failure
2. all of the liability for delays, failure to perform, etc. allocated to the Customer
3. do not have sufficient input from the technical people that will actually be working on the project.
4. no contractual remedies for failure.
5. no change management process.
Point #1 is the most important. In this case, if there were objective criteria to measure success, then the breach of contract case is simple to prove. It is like engaging in the design/plan phase of development before you even sign the contract. If a customer can't figure out what objective criteria it needs, it's probably not a good time to enter a $40M contract. Take for example, the objective criteria that the EDS software will meet the minimum process per second with 150 active users. Easy, does it do? If not, see points 2 and 4.
Point #2 is often overlooked. Customers regularly sign contracts that permit a vendor to deliver something non-conforming on the delivery date and not be in breach. The contracts are also usually written so that the additional time spent correcting the non-conforming deliverables are paid by the Customer. These are usually sneakily inserted under the "right to cure" a breach provision. At some point, the vendor (not the customer) should be paying.
Point #3 is necessary in order to establish point #1 and point #2. Management has this idea: oh we need ___ system. Let's find a vendor of ___ system. However, it is the technical people that need to set the objective criteria and then be able to test that it was met.
Point #4 is the stick with which you beat the Vendor into meeting those requirements. Every customer should be asking, "what happens if they don't deliver?" I say, "show me the money." Of course, you can customize however you see fit. Customers however don't usually ask.
Finally, point #5 is so painful its hard to write about. A lot of time and money is lost because the customer does not have a good internal change management process. In addition, the customer does not put that change management process in writing with the vendor. Any change management process should be coordinated through a project manager. The process should require 1. estimates of cost and 2. affect on time line. These should require signature of someone higher up the chain than the project manager if there is a big impact on price or time--what constitutes a "big impact" should be spelled out (e.g., more than $10,000 or more than a 1 week).
As a last tidbit: technology people need to STOP SIGNING AGREEMENTS WITHOUT A REAL LEGAL REVIEW. This includes the stupid little EULAs that you click ok to. That includes the purchase of off the shelf software. That includes signing up a third party for professional services. Those words mean things. Spending $1-3K now saves a boat load on the backend.
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I'm not in any way a lawyer, but I can't understand how ANYONE would sign a contract for work without #1 and #4 spelled out clearly. Yet we see this over and over and over and over....
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I'm not in any way a lawyer, but I can't understand how ANYONE would sign a contract for work without #1 and #4 spelled out clearly. Yet we see this over and over and over and over....
With a big multi-year project, #5 is at least as important. Things will change because nobody can accurately predict what will happen in the future. But if there's no way to manage the inevitable changes, everything will go badly wrong and in unexpected ways.
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Stupid Ads in TFA (Score:2, Insightful)
Amanda Bucklow at mediation firm In Place Of Strife said that even “a long and extraordinary mediation process would have taken only a few days and cost a lot less” than the legal fees spent by both parties.
And now breaking news! Random person trying to sell you some services thinks you should buy their services!
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Nevermind that apparently a long and extraordinary mediation would only have taken a couple of days, according to her.
SAP (Score:3, Insightful)
Somewhat off topic, but perhaps related to the topic:
Has anyone ever worked in a company where they had a SAP implementation where overall the users and management (and I don't mean snr management who are above it) are actually happy with the outcome?
Re:SAP (Score:5, Insightful)
There was a slashdot article awhile back about an SAP implementation at Waste Management that went bad.
Similar situation to this one.
I really think large companies buying these systems are going to start recording the sales presentations, burn them to DVD, and insist on including them in the contract.
That way the sales representations BECOME part of the whole agreement, and are actionable.
Re:SAP (Score:5, Interesting)
When I was in the U.S. Navy I was lucky to be at a command that was a test platform for an SAP implementation for the Navy(ERP was the Navy name for it). When I was there, if you were a "power user", even if not a computer junkie, it was very easy to get a grip on the program and use it very effectively. Of course, we had alot of complaining by alot of older people that didn't like change (every group will have these people). The actual rolling out of the platform was painful, but once it was in and operating it was great.
Our only issue was that we needed to be able to store classified "Confidential" information. This was information that was simply above public release, but below "Secret". Our procedures required certain safegards that were not easily implemented into SAP at the time. We had a plan to get it to work, but at a pretty significant cost.
Googling I just found www.erp.navy.mil, so it looks like the Navy has started using it more broadly. As much money as the gov't dumps into crazy stuff, I would be the first to say SAP/ERP was money well spent! Just don't mention NMCI(Navy and Marine Corp Intranet).
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I am sure there where some that went well and many that went bad. Now most of them
I am sure are a horrible burden to the bottom line. Installing and running something
like SAP is all well and good when the company is making money and can afford it. When
the bottom drops out the expense and maintenance I am sure only quickens the pace
of demise.
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In order to reconcile our credit card accounts, we are required to "go on a trip".
Did you mention that you can't go on two trips on the same day?
TFA (Score:2)
and
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Well, I get a certain amount of schadenfreude when I see EDS get bad publicity because they basically wily-nily bought companies, destroyed their benefits, sucked any cash surplus out and fired half the workforce before cutting them loose so their stock didn't go junk. Yes, I am speaking from personal experience, and yes, I'm a bit resentful (how do you spin off a company the EDS way? Fire everyone and let the new company rehire - HR LOVED that one, btw). HP, I don't have any qualm against you aside from
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This took 18 months TFA. We don't have the reams of documents they possibly went though.
I can see the manager of Sky emailing a manager at HP/EDS on why its taking so long and the manager blatantly lies. I can also see Sky, after a few months into the projects getting some off hand information decides the change the spec in mid stream.
All this compounded by the fact that neither side seriously looked at either sides contract. I am sure both's in house lawyers did, but upper management don't look at that
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With a contract you can generally point out exactly where obligations to do work were unfulfilled. In this court case, it took 40 million dollars of lawyering to get to the heart of the matter. I suspect that contracts are more easily enforced.
Outsourcing suxors, but ... (Score:4, Insightful)
AC disclosure: I work for BSKYB, but not in CRM ... thank f**k.
Yes, the CRM system has problems, and from a tech perspective I'd agree that it's not worth £48M (OMFG!). However, I think it's amazing that things got this far. If we're in a capitalist society then I also want this to be a meritocracy and I want someone in Sky to publicly take the blame for this 3rd party POS. Regardless of the internal or external software teams, it should never be allowed to degenerate to this level of incompetence.
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People don't get to be in important positions by taking the blame for problems. They get to be in those positions by deflecting the blame to someone else.
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It's hard to allocate blame in these cases. The internal staff typically work excessively hard to make the original contract work.
Someone senior usually gets booted out halfway through that leaving someone new to pick up the pieces, but the person booted out tends to have been constrained by various factors and acting with the best intentions, but caught out by a mix of supplier incompetence (don't assume malice), internal incompetence, overcommitment, inappropriate priorities and sometimes just being in ov
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That's kind of like saying "If floorplan of this room is a triangle, I also want it to have interior angles that total 360 degrees."
It's the relationship, stupid! (Score:3, Interesting)
I've done a lot of contract work, but nothing on the scale of a CRM install. Despite that, there are somem things that are the same, no matter the size of the job;
- The relationship is key. If you don't forge a good relationship with your client, you will always suffer. Always.
- If the relationship is good you can overcome any obstacle. Even total failure. Yes, even if your solution turns out to not work at all, you can work out the relationship.
- Relationships are give-and-take. If you succeed wildly, you will get more and better. If you do fairly well, you get what is due. If you mostly fail, you work it out. Sometimes it doesn't work out, true. If you fail totally, well, you get what you deserve.
- Importantly, don't get into a relationship you don't intend to actually work on, and don't have any real expectation of success. Someone on the engineering side of HP-EDS needed to tell the sales side 'we can't do all this'.
- Most important, don't go into a relationship with a crazy partner. Sky may have violated this one. Money makes contractors crazy. Trust me on this. The more money, the crazier. Those of you who have real-life relationships with real-life people will find corollaries to this, and they are indeed true. You do not need to waste your 401K to learn this, ok? The tabloids will offer proof enough. Same thing in business. Almost the same process.
Crazy girl==great in bed/EDS==fucks you, no lube. (Score:2)
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Not in this dimension (Score:2)
And since when has THAT ever worked?
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It all boils down to poor project management, and it's always one (or more) of three reasons. The difficulty in coordinating the non-technical management's expectations and what the sales team thinks is possible with what is actually possible at a given price is the reason something like 80% of all IT projects fail. It's always either scope creep, budget creep, or time creep that kills them.
This sounds like a case of scope creep to me, and I'm actually surprised UK law is screwed up enough to award a 700
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But it's surprising and somewhat depressing how few consultants are willing to give their management that kind of tough love.
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There are two types of contractors:
1. Those who get work.
2. Those who don't.
One way to not get work; fail to develop good relationships with your clients.
Another way to not get work; Fail to do the work.
One way to get more work; keep your client happy.
Another way to get more work; do very good work.
You sound like you want to get paid. Those who have every excuse may not.
I was lucky to work for a small company, so the boss was always available to me. In a setting like EDS, I would not be interested. Too b
I'm confused (Score:2)
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Presumably they incurred costs as a result of EDS not providing what they were supposed to.
Sky and EDS - it couldn't happen to two nicer companies. With luck no-one will win except the lawyers.
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Shouldn't BSkyB just get back whatever they paid EDS/HP for the project, e.g. £48 million? What's the rest of the £200 million/£700 million claim for?
Interesting implications (Score:3, Insightful)
FTA it sounds like the salesmen lied and the contract didn't include the lies. The court found EDS liable for what the salesmen said (and prolifically emailed) rather than the signed contract. If that holds it's not outsourcing that will become difficult but selling many complex and high priced products. Each sales meeting could be a contract negotiation with legal implications as well as a demo or whatever. You sales guys might need to drag the lawyer to all your customer meetings going forward. Sales support would become a major pain as well.
Difference between what we can & what is paid (Score:2)
What happens a lot is that the sales people tell we can do A, B and C for you. Then pricing happens, and client is only willing to pay for A.
Contract is limited to A and closed. Then client figures out that in the end they need B and C.
Is that the sales peoples fault?
I still think this is a difficult case and am not aware of all details.
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Each sales meeting could be a contract negotiation with legal implications as well as a demo or whatever.
This would be awesome for the techs who have to deliver the goods.
The sales guys can't just make false promises any more. They'd be on the hook too.
Management would be scared of over-promising in presentations and reign in the sales team.
Now that would change company dynamics.
Ahhhh, if only.
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It'll hurt clients too; I usually ask salespeople for indicative costs, stating (honestly) that I'm not going to treat them as a promise, a commitment or something I can hold them to.
I just need an order of magnitude understanding of how much of my company's money I'm going to have to spend to implement their product. If I have a business need then there's a massive difference between mobilising a whole procurement process for a product because it meets the need superbly, and initiating internal development
HP is run by greedy idiots (Score:3, Interesting)
Being an HP/EDS employee myself, I can guarantee you that I will get screwed.
They already cut my pay once by 5%(plus 15% for one month). After doing this, they also cut several employee's salaries in a "job code alignment", which was just a pay cut in disguise.
This is before and after laying off hundreds of employees, replacing them with morons from India and Malaysia because they are "equally efficient but cheaper".
On the bright side, our CEO make record income thanks to his salary/compensations and his tremendous bonus. Apparently flushing your company down the shitter puts you at the top of the bonus queue.
HP/EDS is run by greedy morons, who outsource all the work to poor morons.
I'm happy to have a job and I hope this whole event doesn't affect me(although I'm sure it will), but HP/EDS can suck it for all I care.
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That's some nice Internet Tough Guy but life doesn't always work that way. I know a few people who are working jobs they loathe in order to support their families. Jobs that were awesome 5 years ago and have gone to shit recently with outsourcing of everything that isn't nailed down, forced "vacations" where the company shuts down for weeks and you can use PTO or go hungry, no bonuses, no raises, pay cuts, etc. If they were single and had nobody depending on their income, they'd bolt in a heartbeat even
Re:HP is run by greedy idiots (Score:4, Interesting)
Ha, I'm laughing at the "put food on the table" crowd. Putting food on the table is a day-to-day chore. Job satisfaction, a suitable home life, unstressed parents and most importantly JOB SECURITY are a million times more important in the long run. It's short-sighted to claim that you have to be completely disrepected as a person in order to feed your family. Baby doesn't care that dad's a road sweeper, or a baker, or an IT manager, so long as he's home after work, and happy, and that he'll *probably* have a job tomorrow.
Working for companies that treat their employees like that is *not* security - security for today, maybe, but not for tomorrow. And the more you "suck it up" and "just deal with it" by continuing to work with employers that are *abusing* you as a human, the more they'll take you to the cleaners. And the more those employers will thrive and really not care about their employees at all. When do the companies stand up and listen and improve pay and conditions? When all their employees start to walk (and no, I'm not and never have been a member of any union, because I have a tendency to believe that other people are just as wet and short-sighted as some of the posters on this thread and I don't want them dictating what work / pay I'm limited to).
Think I'm just mouthing off and haven't ever been in the position? Been there, done that, several times, with a wife, newborn, toddler, etc., with a mortgage to pay, bills everywhere, loan payments, and balancing a thousand other spinning plates. Every time that I got screwed (or sensed it coming), I moved onwards and upwards and got happier in my work (and higher-paid, but that's neither here nor there). One of those times was when my daughter was barely a month old and I walked from a job because they wanted to treat me like shit (they also thought that the *best* candidate for my replacement wasn't suitable because "He's been working at a supermarket for the last month" in the middle of a economic crisis... so f***ing what? He's working, when he could be sitting at home, and he has more than enough experience / skill to do the job). Call me an idiot if you want, but my daughter did not go without at any point and within a week I was working somewhere else for infinitely more respect and a little bit more money.
I'm sorry, but I owe it to my family to keep my self-respect, to teach my daughter that I'm not a faceless, numbered drone, to come home healthy and happy, and if that means we eat bread and water rather than smoked salmon, so be it. And if a large company offering me huge wages for screwing other people over and / or a paycut that I haven't agreed to has to be told to stick their offer where the sun don't shine, I can, will and have done that (on both counts actually - I've turned down jobs that were handed to me on a plate purely because I didn't agree with how the company were making their sales).
Your family need to be fed, but they also need to know that Daddy isn't a robot that can be stepped on by everyone around him. That's teaching your kids nothing but subservience to people with money, and they'll grow up to hate you or follow you in that path. Like any sensible parent, I want my kid to grow up to question things that are wrong, learn the value of money, the value of respect, and to do better at life than I have. In a modern, developed country, starvation is a *long* way off and, if you seek proper help, almost impossible. If it means a choice between giving up my mortgage and making me / my daughter unhappy, it's an easy choice. Sorry, but my daughter's respect for her father cannot be bought for any job, price or token gesture. And nothing buys my daughter's happiness except my own, and that can't be had by knowing I'm "only" putting food on the table.
Live your corporate existence being abused and trodden on because there "aren't many jobs about". But it's not for me. I'll take my kid to the park rather than to a stadium, I'll show her how to cook masses of cheap soup instead of takeaways and restaurants, and I'll end up having more fun and gaining more respect in the process.
Outsourcing (Score:4, Informative)
Anyone know of any large outsourcing company that deliver what they promised, to a decent quality?
Capita [capita.co.uk] are another company that comes to mind. They have ripped off most public services in the UK with their poor products. Capita did a good job [birminghampost.net] at ripping Birmingham City Council [birmingham.gov.uk] off with their new web site.
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Anyone know of any large outsourcing company that deliver what they promised, to a decent quality?
No. And I'd never in my life hire one.
If you're a big company with a reasonably bespoke requirement for software which isn't going to die after a few months, then you should treat it as part of your company. I'm amazed when companies think they can treat their complex data like something as simple as business stationery or the car fleet.
The one time it's worth going 3rd party is for highly specialised expertise or non-bespoke software.
Douche bag editoral summary (Score:2, Funny)
Let me give you a little fucking hint, when the company you work for, losses a 200M lawsuit, because you were a fuck up ... a pay cut should be the least of your worries.
Where the fuck did this ridiculous sense of entitlement come from? What the hell is wrong with people now days? You don't exactly get raises when you screw up, ESP
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I'm confused. You work 80 hour weeks trying to implement the impossible solution your fuckwit sales team promised to the client, fail because it really genuinely is impossible, and then get fucked over by the new owner of your company.
How exactly are you responsible for the £200m lawsuit? Other than increasing its costs by not refusing to work on the bloody thing in the first place (i.e. quitting or getting sacked).
EDS had a terrible reputation and I pretty much hated the company, but that doesn't mea
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When a fuckwit sales team promises the impossible they have given you license to not work.
The outcome is inevitable. As you state it's an 'impossible solution'.
Just stop working, look busy and focus on getting another job.
Remember who gains/loses if someone somehow implements the 'impossible solution'.
The sales maggot gains, his lies are now truth. His commission is now from a successful project. He will be telling new lies for the foreseeable future.
The developer loses, he worked his ass off to
Good call /. (Score:2)
The bottom of page quote for this:
Even if you can deceive people about a product through misleading statements, sooner or later the product will speak for itself. - Hajime Karatsu
Oh my God (Score:3, Funny)
Sales people lied...I'm Shocked.
An insider perspective from a different case (Score:2, Interesting)
I was called into the middle of a $110 million dollar contract between a very well known multibillion dollar company and HP. I was a subcontractor for HP that was assigned to make things work on the front lines. The vendor promised a migration of tens of thousands of computers without any need for desktop engineers other than simple boxing and unboxing. Over 800 packaged apps were on the line and over 50 desktop platforms had to be made to move to a single standard image.
The client at the time had an alm
It doesn't have to be this way (Score:2, Interesting)
None of these is healthy and when it goes wrong, the only winners are the lawyers. I worked with a Major European Telco which outsourced the development of a large so
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...no doubt management will try and screw them further to pay for this debacle."
Yeah. Printer ink will now start costing $7,000 a gallon instead of the paltry $6,400 it does now.
I'm not really sure how raising the price of printer ink is going to screw the striking HP workers.
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Not printer ink, this is about outsourcing. Printer ink costs a lot because of the pretty packaging.
I disagree with that, though I am sure the packaging is also a factor. Liquid printer ink (i.e. for ink jets) costs so much because the printers are sold as cheaply as possible, at a very low margin and maybe even at a loss. The company then hopes to make that profit back by selling overprices consumables. Laser printers don't use this model. This is why when you buy a laser printer, you pay significantly more money up-front for the printer itself and thereafter you can purchase cheap consumables that m
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Printer Ink costs a lot because the DMCA made it a felony for the low cost and refillable ink cartridge makers to engineer compatible cartridges since the big companies started including DRM in them.
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Printer Ink costs a lot because the DMCA made it a felony for the low cost and refillable ink cartridge makers to engineer compatible cartridges since the big companies started including DRM in them.
If I remember correctly, Lexmark fell flat on their face when they tried that argument on a competitor. It's not as easy as "software + copyright + DRM = DMCA". DMCA prevents unauthorised access to protected copyrighted software. Lexmark's printer cartridges contained _unprotected_ software that was so primitive that it was found to be not deserving of copyright, so copying it was found to be neither copyright violation nor DMCA violation. Lexmark tried to prevent users of their printers from accessing comp
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I think it's about HP deriving most of its profits from printer ink.
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The judgement is expected to change the legal basis for sales pitches and contracts. It is likely to mean that IT services companies will have to be very careful about what they suggest they are able to do during sales meetings, as they may be held accountable even if discussions are informal.
You better be careful in what you say, indeed.
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Oh god I wish that was the case around here.
Currently I'm looking at 1-2 months of (unpaid) overtime because sales people have sold something we didn't have and never checked with the software guys. For once I wish sales was the one ending up neck deep in crap.
(Why do I do it? Well if no one else does it, the company goes bankrupt and doing unpaid overtime is better than no pay)
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If your employer's finances are so bad that not working 1-2 months of unpaid overtime will bankrupt them, I advise that you start looking for another job.
While most economies are starting to recover from recent event, decent well paying jobs are still thin on the ground. He may well be looking for alternative employment while working the current job. No point going until you've got somewhere to go to...
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Let me guess, you're exempt and don't get over-time. And the sales people are mostly commissioned-based, and their commission is not based on the completion (nor the success) of the project (but just on having a signed contract with the client).
If that's the case, and if you don't rise up, expect this kind of pattern of behavior to continue. I've seen sales people take down companies because they were chasing poorly structured commissions (instead of worrying about the viability and profitability of each de
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When they start tieing sales commissions to the delivery team actually being able to make good on what was promised then maybe there will be some changes. The Sales team would never buy into that as they think the delivery team are idiots and would screw them with cost over-runs, change orders for no costs, etc. . So you make BOTH teams have a mo
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Of course one day pigs will fly too.
Actually, it's one thing to go to management and ask for more money, and it's another to go to management and ask that they don't pay as much or defer payment to their sales people. That latter request, cutting costs and pissing off an entire department of sales employees, is what will make you look like management material.
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Here in the UK verbal contracts are legally binding as long as it can be proved what was said (i.e. witness testimony). Written contracts can also be implicitly agreed to without signing them, e.g. if I received a contract of employment that had a clause in that I disputed, but turned up for work before the dispute was solved and the contract signed, then I will have implicitly agreed to the original vers
Re:No comment... (Score:4, Informative)
I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. And even if I were a lawyer, I am not your lawyer. That said, the limits on verbal agreements are pretty narrow in the US. Basically:
Are not able to be made with a verbal contract. Everything else goes. For example, multi million dollar stock transactions are done verbally every work day. (yes end of day settlement does turn into a he said she said discussion with millions on the line during market downturns.)
So, in the US a company sales team that promises that it can duplicate Google.com in six months for ten million dollars, could be screwed if the company cashes the check. Even if no executive officer signs off on it. (Then again a company that is depositing ten million dollar checks without oversight is screwed anyways.)
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World famous EDS quote. "Never get sales confused with delivery."
Re:Scope creep? (Score:4, Informative)
Confused much? EDS is HP. The customer was BskyB.
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Damn. And I actually read the article and everything. I really should have had my morning caffeine first.
Ah well, no-one's perfect. Certainly not any of the participants in this debacle, whoever they were.
Re:Scope creep? (Score:5, Informative)
BSkyB was the client in this case, EDS was the company contracted to provide services. EDS has since been bought by HP and so HP is now on the hook for the EDS fubar.
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HP does not play a part in your conversation until 2008.
EDS told BskyB that they would deliver a CRM system with golden monkeys, BskyB changed their idea for the system to blue unicorns.
The whole delivery tanks, HP buys EDS in 2008 and gets the bill for another 900m pounds.
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*snip*
It goes badly
Everyone sues everyone.
The lawyers win big time.
Hmm - sound familiar?
Yep, far to often its how things go. But not always on this scale.
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I think it is safe to assume that the judge isn't a total moron; so, scope creen won't be at the root of the trouble.
I have managed several large IT outsourcing arrangements, and the supplier's consistently over-promise and under-deliver.
A big problem on these deals is that the sales team often doesn't have to stay behind after the customer signs; so, they don't have to live with the mess they talked the client into signing. As a result, the sales team doesn't learn from their mistakes.
I hope the ruling ta
Re:Scope creep? (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked as an independent consultant at GM (run by EDS) and at Sky, cleaning up the mess they left behind.
Firstly, on behalf of all the independent consultants and contractors at both sites let me say thank you to EDS. Thank you for our fees. Without your stunning incompetence all down the line none of this would have been possible.
The reality at Sky:
I joined a couple of years after EDS was slung out. Sky had a creaking legacy (green screen) customer installs system. They needed a comprehensive, fully architected CRM system capable of handling their millions of customers. EDS came in, did a brilliant sales demo, then sent in the drones. This is their standard operating procedure. They have smart people to call on - for sales calls. When it looked like they were about to get slung out of GM suddenly the kind of guys who wrote RFCs were all over the place. Once the attention was off they disappeared back to sales calls. This is how all outsourcing operations run.
Sky discovered pretty quick that they were being handed a pos that could never scale to a multi-million customer operation. Pretty quick being after a couple of years of pointless development. After they ditched EDS things didn't really improve: every department (customer services, billing, actuarial, etc etc) chose a "best of breed" app (more like "best of sales demos" app) then spent years customising it to fit. Then a bunch of said indy contractors tried to integrate it all together. We did the best we could.
Counting the bodies in the development halls, and allowing for what Sky had to pay to get people to work in Livingston (Detroit was comparable, if rather bigger) I'd estimate their costs at £50+ Million a year over rather more than five years. This settlement would put a big dent in that, but it certainly won't cover the cost of EDS's truly monumental incompetence.
Coda:
Between the GM and Sky gigs I had a drink with Compaq's top salesman in Toronto. I related the disasters at GM for amusement value, only for him to express his undying affection and admiration for EDS. What goes, I asked, for there was a twinkle in his eye. He explained thusly.
EDS would come to him for a quote for 10,000 PCs in their upgrade cycle for a major client. Said salesman would provide a quote for top of the line PCs at below cost price. A massive loss for Compaq. He would put this deal on paper, fully specced, and pass it across the desk for signatures.
*Three years later* EDS would come back with the sign-off and a purchase order. Compaq would give them 10,000 of the dregs of the warehouse. They would all surpass the three-year-old spec in the contract. Massive profit for Compaq.
I imagine the salesman made a pretty decent bonus too.
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Not sure you read the article. HP completed purchase of EDS after the trial ended, so the only thing HP has to do with this lawsuit is it owns the losing party, which it didn't during the contract. The judgement took 17 months to reach from the end of the trial in July 2008. So the trial ended, and the judge sat around meditating for 17 months, and HP bought EDS.
EDS did not want some sort of CRM, BSkyB did. EDS is an outsourcing company (was, now it's part of HP) and would provide CRM, not purchase it.
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Yeah sure, despite your obvious confusion, you are still wrong. You are only looking at one side.
The other side is that HP/EDS (the same company), over promised on what they could deliver to Sky.
Both are common problems in outsourcing, both are equally likely to be true. In this case, according to the judgement and HP, it seems to be that EDS overpromised more than scope creep occured.
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In statistics, Moran's I is a measure of spatial autocorrelation. Also, Moran is a city in Shackelford County, Texas, United States. The population was 233 at the 2000 census.
Um, maybe you meant something else?
Ah well, at least you didn't criticize my spelling ...
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You realize that we're adults and that you're retarded use of ascii isn't required since no one cares if you say 'fuck' right?
As for their employees, it sounds like they fucked up enough on their own and are too stupid to get a job anywhere else.
Its funny that you talk about 'screwing over the employees' when ... well, they just lost the company 200m
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Hey, HP was a good company, good products, but that was before Fiorina, and before the ink printer scam started...
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Hey, dont change that, the company I work for does a good living by providing quality work, we usually come in when clients get frustrated with the big outsourcers and want someone who gets the work done instead of flooding you with salesdrones.